On shedding frames
The adult mind will frequently run into psychological dead-ends, points where no more evolution is possible within an existing frame, and so growth requires you to descend into chaos, to regress down the stack, in search of new directions forward, in hope of carrying some insights from old frames with you.
I don’t know if “growth” is the right word here, and “evolution” feels off to me, but it’s something like the advancement in harmony or complexity in your sense of identity, purpose, and responsibility. The moment that freezes, it’s as if you’re cut off from the core point of the human experience.
Whether you should take psychedelics, I think, is a matter if you can reliably dissolve frames on your own. If not, maybe you don’t quite need them; I imagine there is wonder, mystery, and value in the aesthetic phantasmagoria, and all sorts of things to learn from terrible trips of demons and such, but the main point might be the new directions they point you in.
Whether you descend abruptly or gently, assisted or natural, there is a natural fear of psychological death, and so to “descend into chaos” requires a trust that you’ll figure out how and where to swim.
It would be cliche and misleading to say today's park walk was "ego death," but surely it felt like a "pause" or a "lapse." It felt like a lucid dream, in that there was a remembered peace in irreality. Irreality, in this sense, I’d describe as a disassociation from the egoic frameworks that have had a strong hold over my walking life in recent weeks; instead, I felt an immersion in nature that felt mysterious. Like an animal, today, tomorrow, yesterday were fuzzy; all social and chronological constructions were, temporarily, erased. By saying it was “mysterious,” I think I mean that I felt the emotional power of a particular moment in a way that escaped classification, and so it has this effect of being suspended in outside the normal stream of the cradle-to-grave arc.